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17 reviews · 11 essays
Related essays
The Verb of Pushing — What Sokoban Invented by Removing "Pull"
Sokoban's minimal grammar of push-only, no-pull invented the deadlock as a form of difficulty. A design reading of the pushing verb through three heirs: Sokobond, Baba Is You, and Patrick's Parabox.
"Verbs Made of Smaller Verbs" — Andrew Plotkin's Zoom-Out Design Pattern, from ThinkyCon 2025
One piece today: "Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out" by Andrew Plotkin, from ThinkyCon 2025 (free online puzzle game developer conference, November 5–7, 2025). A YouTube recording and an essay version at eblong.com are both available. Plotkin describes a design pattern he calls "verbs made of smaller verbs": puzzle games where players discover that the moves they've been making at a high level are themselves entire puzzles at a lower level. Using Hadean Lands, Baba Is You, COCOON, and others as case studies, he lays out three conditions for the pattern to hold, and examines why games like Myst came close but ultimately did not achieve it.
You Have to Burn the Rope (2008) — The Three-Minute Metagame Whose Title Was Also the Walkthrough
In April 2008, Swedish student Kian Bashiri released You Have to Burn the Rope on the Flash portals under the moniker "Mazapan." Its title was, quite literally, the solution, and that too-honest confession sparked enormous internet buzz, carrying the game to an Innovation Award finalist slot at the 2009 Independent Games Festival. This essay reads that under-three-minute joke alongside the Flash portal culture of its era, asking why it still left a real mark on the design history of thinking games.
Counterpoint on Chants of Sennaar — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Chants of Sennaar 8.5/10. I read the negative Steam reviews and examined three families of complaints: genre detours, map-less traversal, and a rushed final act at a full price. Where I agree, and where I push back.
Counterpoint on Antichamber — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Antichamber 8.5/10. I read through the negative reviews and examined five claims: withheld information, trial and error, a reversed difficulty curve, a weaker back half, and the physical toll of all that white. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on Return of the Obra Dinn — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Return of the Obra Dinn 9.5/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined five claims: a screen that induces motion sickness, deduction that leans on stereotypes, an endgame that collapses into brute-force guessing, repetitive corpse-hopping, and a short, unreplayable runtime. Where I agree, where I push back.
Recursion as a Puzzle Grammar — The Nested Logic of Patrick's Parabox and Recursed
A box inside a box, and inside it the same board again. From Recursed to Patrick's Parabox and Cocoon, a reading of nested-puzzle design and why recursion runs so deep.
Counterpoint on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Lorelei and the Laser Eyes 9.0/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined four claims: one-button controls, never knowing where a solution lives, the monotony of combination locks, and unwarned strobing light. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on Outer Wilds — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Outer Wilds 9.5/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined four claims: a loop that wastes your time, a story buried in text, painful ship controls, and unannounced horror. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on Baba Is You — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave Baba Is You a 9.5/10. I sort five recurring negative-review patterns from Steam, Metacritic, and the critical press — the difficulty wall, the single-solution charge, variable explosion, frustration overtaking fun, and uneven difficulty between adjacent levels — and decide where I agree and where I push back.
The Lineage of Meta-Puzzles — When Rules Themselves Started Moving
Where did the idea of manipulating the rules themselves come from? A short genealogy from the single verb of Sokoban to the language of Baba Is You.
Related reviews
The Magic Circle
A first-person meta-puzzle set inside a fantasy game that has been in development for twenty years and is still unfinished. You steal behaviours from creatures and objects, paste them onto other things, and rewrite your way toward the exit. Puzzles have no single intended answer. Released in 2015 by Question, a studio whose members are credited with work on Thief and BioShock.
puzzlemeta-puzzlefirst-personThere Is No Game: Wrong Dimension
A meta point-and-click in which a narrator insists there is no game while you drag and click the furniture of the game itself — title screen, menus, cursor. Each chapter jumps into a parody of a different genre. Made by Draw Me A Pixel.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleOneShot
A top-down puzzle adventure: guide a child through a world whose sun has died, carrying a single lightbulb toward the top of it. Between the item-combining, a handful of puzzles reach out into the player's own computer. From Future Cat.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzlePaquerette Down the Bunburrows
A 2D puzzle game about cornering rabbits down in a warren. The bunnies flee by fixed rules, so you close their escape routes in advance with traps, a pickaxe and carrots. Five themed depths, over a hundred bunnies and a stack of secrets underneath, made by Bunstack.
puzzlesokoban-likepathfindingInscryption
A deckbuilding card game played across a candlelit table from Leshy, a narrator holed up in a cabin: you draw woodland-creature cards and sacrifice your own pieces to put them into play. Stand up from the table and the cabin itself becomes an escape-room puzzle. By Daniel Mullins, who made Pony Island.
puzzlemeta-puzzleescape-roomPony Island
A meta-puzzle in which you are trapped in a deliberately shoddy arcade cabinet built by the devil, alternating between a pony side-scroller and puzzles that reorder instruction blocks inside the machine itself. Daniel Mullins's first commercial release turns the window and the UI into the mechanism.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleVoid Stranger
A 2D Sokoban puzzler in which you lift a floor tile with a rod and set it down elsewhere, descending a forgotten labyrinth past traps and foes. From a handful of verbs grow bottomless puzzles and a hidden story — made by System Erasure.
puzzlesokoban-likemeta-puzzleChants of Sennaar
Climbing a Babel-like tower, you decipher the unknown logographic language of each floor's people from pictures and gestures. A game of observation and inference.
observationnarrative-puzzlemeta-puzzleAntichamber
A first-person puzzler in white walls and black lines that treats non-Euclidean space itself as a grammar.
observationmeta-puzzlefirst-personBlue Prince
A mansion roguelite where each day you draft the room behind the door.
logic-gridpathfindingmeta-puzzleLorelei and the Laser Eyes
In an eerie monochrome hotel, over 150 ciphers, numbers, and symbol puzzles weave through every floor.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleCOCOON
A world inside an orb, an orb inside that world, all the way down.
meta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleassemblyPatrick's Parabox
A textbook example of recursive Sokoban, structured as a master class in pedagogy.
sokoban-likemeta-puzzleOuter Wilds
Explore a solar system on a 22-minute loop and unravel the mysteries of an ancient race.
narrative-puzzleobservationmeta-puzzleBaba Is You
A language Sokoban where you push the rules themselves around.
meta-puzzlesokoban-likeReturn of the Obra Dinn
A monochrome mystery where an insurance assessor must identify sixty crew and reconstruct their fates aboard a ghost ship.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleHer Story
Search a police database of live-action video clips to reconstruct the story of a missing husband. An FMV mystery.
narrative-puzzleobservationmeta-puzzle
